This invention relates to a multi-flavor filling head of a high speed pouch packager. Pouches are used for a variety of dry or liquid products such as sugar, sweeteners, salt, creamers, drink mixes, soup mixes and the like. Examples of basic pouch forming and filling machines are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,344,576, 3,453,799 and 3,667,188, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference. These patents show how a continuous web of pouch material is folded, sealed on two sides, filled through the open top, sealed on top and then severed into individual, filled pouches. The severed pouches are fed to a stacker or cartoner.
The described pouch-forming operations begin at a feeder for supplying a continuous web of pouch material. The feeder typically includes a plow for folding the web. The folded web goes to a vertical heat sealer which forms spaced side seals. The side seals define a series of pouches having an open top. The open pouches go to a filling wheel for filling with a product through the open top of the pouch. Then a top sealer closes the top edge of the filled pouches, and a knife severs them into individual pouches or groups of pouches with or without perforations between them.
In the past high speed machines have typically packaged a single product in sequential pouches which are cut into individual, single pouches or groups of two, three or more pouches with perforations between them. The desire to be able to make multiple flavor packs has been longstanding. These are used as display packs, samplers and variety packs in bags or cartons. In such a pack, sometime called a multi-flavor pack, the products in sequential pouches are not the same. For example, a three-pouch pack might contain a vanilla, chocolate and strawberry flavored drink mix. In the past packaging multiple flavors required either machinery dedicated solely to this task, multiple machines or, at best, difficult and time-consuming handling and scheduling logistics. Even the basic variety pack (multiple flavors in individual pouches supplied in a common wrapper) required that a machine produce one of the flavors and store the finished pouches, clean and change over the machine for the next flavor, run the next flavor, store those pouches and so on; later, all the flavors would have to be counted and combined by hand.
The only alternative to this would be using, for example, three machines, and running them simultaneously into custom collation equipment for counting and combining the output from the machines. This is, of course, very costly and less efficient in that when one machine is unable to run, the entire line is shut down. There are machines that will package two flavors at the same time, but they are not in the high speed realm. They also cannot leave the pouches perforated together and could never change between two and three flavors.